Kwik zakt, maar Britse politici zijn nog steeds bevangen door opwarming

Peter Lilley is de eenzame stem van de rede in het energiedebat.

Christopher Booker is een van de beste wetenschapsjournalisten van Groot-Brittannië. Hij schrijft al vele jaren kritisch en vaak ook vermakelijk in de Britse 'Telegraph' over de klimaathysterie die het land in haar greep houdt. Maar de conservatieve MP, Peter Lilley, is daarop een uitzondering.

Christopher Booker:

Last week it was reported that 3,318 places in the USA had recorded their lowest temperatures for this time of year since records began. Similar record cold was experienced by places in every province of Canada. So cold has the Russian winter been that Moscow had its deepest snowfall in 134 years of observations. Here in Britain, where we had our fifth freezing winter in a row, the Central England Temperature record – according to an expert analysis on the US science blog Watts Up With That – shows that in this century, average winter temperatures have dropped by 1.45C, more than twice as much as their rise between 1850 and 1999, and twice as much as the entire net rise in global temperatures recorded in the 20th century.

But, hang on, it wasn’t meant to be like this. Weren’t we told that, thanks to all that carbon dioxide we are pumping into the air, the world was faced with global warming; that, according to the computer models, temperatures were due to rise by at least 0.3C every decade; and that snowfall in Britain was “a thing of the past”? Wasn’t it to meet this unprecedented threat that our MPs voted almost unanimously for the Climate Change Act? Weren’t we meant to be “giving a lead to the world” by cutting our CO2 emissions by 80 per cent in 40 years, doubling our electricity bills by heaping taxes on fossil fuels, and spending hundreds of billions on subsidising all of those 32,000 wind turbines?

Somehow oblivious to this, the world’s emissions of CO2 have continued to hurtle upward, by 50 per cent since 1990. Yet global temperatures have obstinately failed to rise. Attempts to get a global agreement on cutting CO2 emissions have collapsed. Pretty well every developed country, apart from Britain, is going flat out to build more fossil-fuelled power stations – leaving our own politicians almost alone in the world, with their fantasy that, by “decarbonising” our economy at unimaginable cost, we can still somehow give everyone else a lead in changing the earth’s climate.

Has there ever in history been such an almighty disconnect between observable reality and the delusions of a political class that is quite impervious to any rational discussion? This was superbly illustrated by two Commons debates on Thursday April 18, when for the first time we had an MP, Peter Lilley, standing up in Parliament to confront the rest of them with an utterly withering blast of reality.

Lees verder hier.

Wat zei Lilley dan? Daarvoor moeten we bij James Delingpole, een al even briljante Britse wetenschapsjournalist, zijn:

James Delingpole:

... And then there's this utterly magnificent performance by Peter Lilley in a climate change debate at Westminster Hall last week, up against two of his more bubonic colleagues Tim "Trougher" Yeo and Greg "so utterly crap he doesn't even merit a nickname" Barker. Lilley was participating in his new role as a member of the Climate Change Committee, which he was able to infiltrate by means of a secret ballot. I recommend you read the full Hansard transcript. It is, as they say, *popcorn*.

Here is Lilley on the various COP (Conference of the Parties) meetings staged around the world at venues like Copenhagen, Durban, Cancun, Doha etc. (But never Eastbourne, I notice):

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. One of the early signs of madness is an indulgence in compulsive displacement activity, which could not be a better description of the whole COP process. Tens of thousands of people are displaced across the globe to an environment where they are cut off from reality and the rest of the world, where they can indulge themselves in demonstrating their lack of realism and reality, and where the original objective of obtaining a legally binding agreement between nations to reduce worldwide emissions has itself been displaced by the alternative objective of reaching an agreement to meet again—and to agree to reach an agreement at some distant future time. That is displacement activity on a massive scale, and it involves a massive degree of hypocrisy, given the huge emissions incurred by these eco-warriors as they swan across the globe in jets and hire fleets of limousines, so emitting more CO2 than a small African country.

On fossil fuel:

I do not like seeing hundreds of millions of my fellow human beings wallowing in misery and living lives that are stunted relative to what their material living standards might be if they achieved economic growth. But growth requires energy—it is almost synonymous with the rise in the use of energy—and the growth in energy use needed to raise their living standards will absorb much of their capacity to invest and much of the capital available for them to invest in future decades. Fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy. Renewables cost two or more times as much as fossil fuels to produce a given amount of energy. If developing countries are forced to use renewables, they could only afford less than half as much energy as they would otherwise be able to bring on stream. That means they will not use renewables; they will continue to develop by exploiting the use of fossil fuels.

Zie verder hier.

En Lilley gaat verder met het fileren van de dwaze ideeën van zijn collega's, waaronder een aantal bizarre suggesties om de samenwerking tussen Groot-Brittannië en China (!) op energiegebied te bevorderen. Vuurwerk! Een genot om te lezen!

Voor mijn eerdere DDS-bijdragen, zie hier.